Abstraction: the continual fascination

Say what you like about abstract art it continues to fascinate, tantalize - yes sometimes frustrate and annoy (!) people...
As quilt makers, I think abstract art is a lot more inspiring than more realistic art.  And of course abstraction spans a very wide field - from the throw and see what happens of abstraction expressionism - though some were a lot better at throwing or dripping or pouring than others! - through to the precise geometry of people like comma Abts.  From the Impressionists' abstraction of light...through to those who focus on a detail, or an unusual angle....already I can feel my mouth watering at the design possibilities!!

I was lucky enough to stumble across a very fine review of abstraction at the Met (NYC) this last spring as well as a wonderful example of paper/fabric collages by Miriam Schapiro at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD).  

Look at some of these great mind boggling inspiring images!!

here's Jennifer Bartlett, a long time favorite of mine...notice how she organizes the three elements of fish, lily pads and a grid (she loves grids!!) - into a balanced design.  She's not interested in realism or perspective but rather in the contrasts of shape and movement...and the grid helps to pull everything together as well as provide interest in the negative areas...We can learn so much from analyzing how the abstract painters just do it!!




Below is Anselm Kiefer and the Met's notes - always interesting....from this we can take the idea of flattening out the shapes created by plants and weeds, the drama of the black and white...we don't have to include bloated corpses of course!!! The way the plants are arranged into a  coherent jumble is inspiration enough!!




and below a little Mondrian I hadn't seen before....I love the way he balance and contains that huge red square - see how some shapes are bounded on all four side, some three, some two and so on...not chance..this all carefully worked out...also the balance of the two very heavy black rectangles with the red....and the line across the top of the red....





Here's the whole painting...and a detail of this Joseph Stella painting...doesn't it look so quilterly???
He's divided the images he was inspired by into patches.....hmmm...now that's something we could do!!  There's a Welsh fiber artist whose name I'm blocking on right now!!! Edwina or Edith....Hughes or hews...or something similar....she worked in this way too....







And of course one of my other favorites, Kandinsky...before he got too spiritual!!!  this series of paintings around the time of the magazine he started, Blaue Reiter, always seem to tell a story....and yet they are beautifully composed and designed even if the story is totally mysterious......and we can see how he pulls all these disparate ideas together and organizes them.....





And now the two Schapiro pieces....a lot of cloth, in some there was a little paper too....I'll make the images as large as I can.  These were big full "quilt" in size...the lower one is very formally organized like a traditional quilt pattern but a great deal of variety and fun going on.
The upper one I just love with all its wonderful energy and yet it is all of a piece...and you can see just exactly how she has done that.





I do hope I've intrigued you  into thinking more about abstract art as a great way to inspire your own quilt designs....I do just happen to have a couple of classes with www.academyofquilting.com
that focus on many different ways of coming up with designing inspired by abstraction!!!  One starts this Friday - July 6th - the other will be later this year...I just found so much inspiration there was too much for one class!!

So, if you have been, thanks for reading...AND think ABSTRACTLY!!!!  so much more fun!!
Elizabeth